We are thrilled to be back this year for another year of conversations with artists, writers, and creatives in residence at Centrum’s Artist Residency Program.

This year, we bring you a series of five conversations held in October 2022 among our cohort of Emerging Artists and Writers who took a moment out of their residencies to pair up and talk process and share experiences related to their various practices.

Garland and maximiliano talk about everything from video games to ghosts alongside questions exploring self-care and what it means to slow down.

Spencer Garland

Spencer Garland is an interdisciplinary artist and teacher operating in Portland, Oregon. His practice encompasses filmmaking, video game development, and social work-all of which Garland brings his unique vision of new Black narratives to life. His greatest accomplishment is the creation of BRENDA ARTS. Named after his late mother, BRENDA is a media company that integrates the ideas of BIPOC youth into every project via their after-school programming.  BRENDA ARTS’ goal is to create an outlet for a new Black artistic expression and boost the voices of marginalized groups. BRENDA ARTS has expanded into the new media space with BRENDA LAB, an interactive web series about Black art and culture made in collaboration with the Portland Art Museum, and Quantum Phantom Basketball, a basketball adventure video game currently in development for Panic Inc.’s Playdate console.

maximiliano

mononymously named, maximiliano, is a conceptual artist exploring a Black reclamation rococo multimedia mythos of themes & concepts of multiplicity & fluidity & race, blackness, pleasure, desirability, innocence, & imagination; digitally, physically, & communally. A generative practice of ideation & visualization; multimedia, embodied mythos & narratives – as changing the past, present, future. Expressed as self portrait, performance, installation, video, GIF, sculpture, thought, sound, movement, fabrique trapresties, collaboration, publications, body, objects, & choreography; to transform space; echoing frequencies into & through the viewer experiencing the ineffable, chthonic, profane & pleasurable. A varied & research based practice straddling mythologies, eschaton, cosmology, internet creations, Glitch Feminism, & Black nihilistic futures. ritual.